ICS | PaaS Community Blog

PaaS free trial accounts ICS and PCS, IoT and PaaS for SaaS

February 27, 2017 Leave a comment

As part of our communities we do offer free PaaS accounts (only for partners in Europe, Middle East and Africa. In case you are not part of EMEA please contact your local partner manager):

· Integration Cloud Service & Process Cloud Service & SOA Cloud & IoT & PaaS for SaaS Service PaaS Demo Accounts (Community membership required)

· Java Cloud Service & Application Cloud Container Service & Mobile Cloud Service PaaS Demo Accounts (Community membership required)

Watch the GSE Overview Video! Get an overview of what GSE is and how you can use GSE to help you sell. You can also get long running dedicated PaaS instances, therefore please send us details about your use cases. For instant access please request a sandbox demo

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For regular information on Oracle SOA Suite become a member in the SOA & BPM Partner Community for registration please visit www.oracle.com/goto/emea/soa (OPN account required) If you need support with your account please contact the Oracle Partner Business Center.

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Cloud Integration Part 4: Design Patterns by Joel Perez and Arturo Viveros

February 5, 2017 Leave a comment

In this fourth and last chapter of the Oracle Cloud Integration Series, we will go through a series of design patterns, which should facilitate the implementation of scenarios similar to those explained in chapters 2 and 3.

These patterns are proven solutions to the multiple challenges posed by Cloud Integration requirements. Besides explaining them, we’ll also attempt to establish a relationship between them and the toolset provided by the Oracle stack.

We’ll review the following patterns:

Multi-Device Broker

Service State Management
Service Agent Architecture

All of these patterns also support and comply with the characteristics, deployment and delivery models mentioned in the first chapter, so let’s describe them one by one:

Multi-Device Broker

Cloud integration will most likely require our services, whether they are cloud-based or on-premise, to interact with multiple devices, components, channels and protocols. This can automatically lead to lack of inter-operability among the various elements of such scenarios, necessitating conversion/transformation logic as part of our integration workflows, and surfacing hidden integration costs–and, in some cases, tight coupling and vendor lock-in.

Take a look at the following interface-enabled, Enterprise Application Integration(EAI) style architecture for a cloud integration scenario: Read the complete article here.

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Integration Cloud Service (ICS) – How to use Upsert Operation by Shalindra Singh

February 4, 2017 Leave a comment

Oracle launches ICS around April, 2015 and is being accepted by customer well. As customers started using ICS for Salesforce Integration, one question was observed and asked by lots of customers, is related to Upsert operation usage. We will dig deep into this in this blog.

Salesforce to ERP Integration common scenarios are –

Account and Contact Sync
Product and Price Sync
Opportunity or Quote to Order (Sales Order)
Order Status Update back to Salesforce.com
Invoice Data Transfer to Salesforce.com

Other Integration flows include, History, Attachments, Warranty, Cases, etc…

In most of the scenarios where data needs to be inserted or updated into Salesforce.com, recommended operation is Upsert to be used. When Upsert Operation is leveraged, Salesforce SOAP API automatically check based on external Id defined whether incoming record exists or not; if it does exist then record gets updated or else inserted. Click here for more information on upsert operation.

But when you start using Upsert operation with any standard or custom objects from Salesforce.com, by default, external id is not defined in Salesforce.com. So if you have decided to use upsert operation in an integration flow, first thing to do is to define / create external id in the object(s) you are planning to use with upsert operation.

Creation of External ID:

External Id is important parameter for upsert operation. To avoid data duplication external id should be created with utmost care. Best practice suggests to use foreign key (unique key) as an external key. if foreign key is composite key, external key should also be composite. It allows you to create or update a record and relate it to another existing record in a single step instead of querying the parent record ID first.

Let’s take an example here. consider I am working on Account Sync and I am bringing customers master data from ERP to Salesforce.com. So to create external id in Account object, login to Salesforce.com and then navigate to setup -> App Setup -> Customize -> Account -> Fields. To create a new fields, click on new button on this page. Select the data type (for example Text) and click to Next. Provide name for this external id field (appending ext_id in the name is considered best practice) and select external id check box on this page as shown in the below diagram. Read the complete article here.

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Integration Cloud Service (ICS) Security & Compliance by Greg Mally

February 3, 2017 Leave a comment

The attached white paper is the product of a joint A-Team effort that included Deepak Arora, Mike Muller, and Greg Mally. Oracle Integration Cloud Service (ICS) runs within the Oracle Cloud where the architecture is designed to provide customers with a unified suite of Cloud Services with best-in-class performance, scalability, availability, and security. The Cloud Services are designed to run on a unified data center, hardware, software, and network architecture. This document is based on the Cloud Security Assessment section of the Security for Cloud Computing: 10 Steps to Ensure Success V2.0 document, which is produced by the Cloud Standards Customer Council where Oracle is a member. Read the complete article here.

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Integration Cloud Service: How to keep all data residing in your applications in sync? by Philipp Langer

January 30, 2017 Leave a comment

Because things in IT change fast, it’s sometimes difficult to distinguish the important trends from the less important. And that’s true for Oracle as well. It’s not that long ago when Oracle CEO Larry Elisson thought of Cloud Computing as just another short-living fashion trend (great audio by the way). But that began to change soon. And at least since Oracle OpenWorld 2015 we know for sure how serious Oracle became about Cloud Computing.

“The computer industry is the only industry that is more fashion-driven than women’s fashion.” – Larry Ellison, chairman, Oracle

Today, Oracle’s stack on the Cloud is complete. From infrastructure as a service (IaaS) to software as a service (SaaS) there is everything. But especially with all those wonderful SaaS products being available (and probably being used by your line of businesses) new challenges arise: How to keep all the data residing in those applications in sync? In other words: How to integrate those products? A neat way to address this is the Oracle Integration Cloud Service (ICS) which I would like to introduce to you in this blog post.

Besides ICS I’m also going to mention two other integration services provided by Oracle namely SOA Suite Cloud Service (SSCS) and Process Cloud Service (PCS). Though for this blog post I won’t go into much detail there.

Integration Cloud Service

The main reason to use Oracle ICS is to map and synchronize data between all different kinds of SaaS applications. For example, you might use Salesforce as your primary CRM application but another one for ERP activities such as order and invoice tracking. In such a case, if a new customer is created in Salesforce it should be created in the ERP application as well – automatically and immediately.

The attentive reader might be wondering whether Oracle ICS is limited to cloud integrations. The answer is no. Hybrid integrations are supported as well but more on this later.

ICS Components

Based on the main menu, functionality in ICS is organized into four main views: home page, designer portal, monitoring (dashboard) and administration. Before going into detail of monitoring functionality and administration, let’s have a look at the Designer.

As you can see, the designer portal in turn is organized into five views: Integrations, Connections, Lookups, Packages and Agents. You might notice as well how clear and simple the UI appears. That clearly indicates the target audience of ICS: not only developers and IT but LOB users as well. Read the complete article here.

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What’s New for Oracle Integration Cloud Service Release 16.4.5

January 16, 2017 Leave a comment

This release of Oracle Integration Cloud Service includes two new adapters (DB2 Adapter and Oracle Logistics Adapter) and enhancements to the REST Adapter, SOAP Adapter, FTP Adapter, and Salesforce Adapter. Enhancements are also provided for orchestrated integrations, scheduled integrations, orchestrated integration creation options, custom adapter uploads, Expression Builder functions, XPath extension functions, exported/imported integrations, diagnostic logs, and REST APIs. See below for details.

Read the complete article here.

Learn More: More details on what’s new is available here. Learn more about Oracle Integration Cloud Service at http://cloud.oracle.com/integration

Want to try ICS Cloud Service? Get access here.

Partner Resources (community membership required):

Sales kit for partners: Cloud and On-Prem Integration: Integrate CRM SaaS Apps with On-Premises ERP & Integrate HCM Cloud with on-premises ERP

Marketing kit for partners: SOA Campaigns

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Enhancing ICS Mappings with Custom Java Classes by Ricardo Ferreira

January 4, 2017 Leave a comment

Introduction

One of the most common tasks performed during the creation of integrations in ICS (Integration Cloud Service) is the implementation of mappings. In a nutshell, mappings are the resources that ICS uses to allow messages coming from the configured source application to be sent to the configured target application. Failure in properly defining and configuring these mappings directly impacts how integrations are going to behave while sending messages downstream.

In order to build mappings in ICS, users make use of the mapping editor. The mapping editor allows for the creation of complex XPath expressions via an intuitive drag-and-drop interface. Besides the support for XPath expressions, it is also possible to use built-in XSLT functions available within the Mapping Components section of the mapping editor, as shown in figure 1.

However, it is not uncommon to find situations in which the set of built-in functions is not adequate to perform a specific data handling operation. When that happens, most people using ICS feel they’ve hit a roadblock due to the fact that there is no way to simply add a custom function. While there is always the possibility to open an SR (Service Request) within Oracle and request an enhancement, sometimes this is not possible because the ongoing project requires at least a workaround in order to be able to finish the use case in a timely manner.

This blog is going to show how classes from ICS’s Fusion Middleware foundation can be leveraged to provide custom data handling in mappings. To illustrate this, the following sections will show how to perform Base64 data decoding, using a utility class from the Oracle WebLogic API.

Programming in XLST Directly

In contrast to what many people think, ICS is not a black box. You can access pretty much everything that is generated by ICS when you export the integration, as shown in figure 2. Once you have access to the integration archive file, you can see what ICS generated for you and in case of mappings, even change it. Read the complete article here.

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OUGN 2016 | Help! What integration solution is best for me? By Ronald van Luttikhuizen

January 3, 2017 Leave a comment

We used to have heated debates whether to use SOA Suite or Service Bus. With the release of Oracle’s Platform as a Service (PaaS) products like Integration Cloud Service (ICS) and SOA Suite Cloud Service (SOA CS), this discussion is fueled with even more options. In this session we will explain Oracle integration solutions like ODI, SOA Suite, etc. and compare ICS, SOA CS, Oracle Service Bus and Oracle SOA Suite with each other. All these options are illustrated with a use case. Get the presentation here.

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Fixing cloud integration by Andrew Bell

January 3, 2017 Leave a comment

Today, most companies are still overwhelmingly on-premise. However, enterprises are turning more and more to the cloud in an effort to reduce the total cost of ownership (TCO) of IT architectures.

Many hope to offload non-value adding processes and applications to the cloud, whilst others are looking to migrate fully to the cloud as part of their digital transformation journey. For SaaS applications to provide real value to businesses however, they need to integrate with other SaaS or on-premise applications in order to prevent the creation of data silos.

During the first wave of SaaS implementations, lines of business have typically introduced SaaS applications without regard for the overall IT strategy. Equally, they have built their own point-to-point integrations with other applications. This results in a non-architected integration landscape which is difficult to maintain and build upon.

In such scenarios, different and often incompatible standards and software are used to provide data integration, meaning that the cost of ownership has actually increased and cross divisional integration is more complex than ever. Security holes can also result in potential risks to organizations.

This piecemeal approach leads to a mass of point-to-point integrations done haphazardly and without real thought to common standards, community management, security, scalability, visibility or agility. Furthermore, because integration is point to point, companies face real difficulties upgrading when endpoints change.

Many enterprises that attempt cloud integrations end up in this state, which is why more than half of SaaS applications fail to live up to expectations. The cloud introduces a whole new dimension of complexity including:

§ IT is no longer fully central and controlled. Cloud applications do not run in an organization’s data center, and availability, reliability, security policies etc. are governed by the SaaS vendor.

§ Tooling is often inconsistent. Cloud providers may provide unique integration toolkits and APIs. An integration tool from one vendor may not be compatible with another cloud vendor. As the number of cloud providers increase, so does the number of integration toolkits. This can lead to a spaghetti of complex integrations between various SaaS and on-premise applications. Read the complete article here.

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Using Event Handling Framework for Outbound Integration of Oracle Sales Cloud using Integration Cloud Service by Naveen Nahata

January 2, 2017 Leave a comment

Introduction:

Oracle’s iPaaS solution is the most comprehensive cloud based integration platform in the market today. Integration Cloud Service (ICS) gives customers an elevated user experience that makescomplex integration simple to implement.

Oracle Sales Cloud (OSC) is a SaaS application and is a part of the comprehensive CX suite of applications. Since OSC is usually the customer master and is the center for all Sales related activities, integration with OSC is often a requirement in most use cases

Although OSC provides useful tools for outbound as well as inbound integration, it is a common practice to use ICS as a tool to integrate OSC and other SaaS as well as on-premises applications. In this article, I will explore this topic in detail and also demonstrate the use of Event Handling Framework (EHF) in OSC to achieve the same.

Main Article:

Within ICS you can leverage the OSC adapter to create an integration flow. OSC can act both as source (inbound) or as target (outbound) for integration with other SaaS or on-premises applications; with ICS in the middle acting as the integration agent. While the inbound integration flow is triggered by the source application, invoking the outbound flow is the responsibility of OSC.

In this article, I will discuss the outbound flow, where OSC acts as the source and other applications serve as the target. There are essentially 2 ways of triggering this integration:

Invoking the ICS integration every time the object which needs to be integrated is created or updated. This can be achieved by writing groovy code inside create/update triggers of the object and invoking the flow web service by passing in the payload.
Using the Event Handling Framework (EHF) to generate an update or create event on the object and notify the subscribers. In this case, ICS registers itself with OSC and gets notified when the event gets fired along with the payload

OSC supports events for most important business objects such as Contact, Opportunities, Partners etc. More objects are being enabled with EHF support on a continuous basis.

In this article, I will demonstrate how to use EHF to achieve an outbound integration. We will create a flow in ICS which subscribes to the “Contact Created” event and on being notified of the event, updates the newly created contact object. While this integration is quite basic, it demonstrates the concept. While we use Update Contact as a target for our integration, you can use another SaaS application (for example Siebel or Service Cloud) as the target and create a Contact there. Read the complete article here.

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